Right Thinking: Sneaking back to Common Core

It’s difficult to tell when policy experts are offering poor advice. Their familiarity with the field and its jargon enables them to make arguments that sound convincing to people busy pursuing their own affairs.

In this legislative session, many education experts are trying to convince us to scrap our current system of end-of-instruction exams. They want to replace them with the ACT exam, one of the tests used by higher education institutions to measure a student’s capacity to succeed in the first year of college. Currently, in order to receive a high school diploma, a student must pass four out of seven state exams. Specifically, students must pass both an English and an algebra exam. They must also pass two of five exams in advanced algebra and English, geometry, biology and U.S. history.

The ACT advocates make seductive arguments. Why should our overstressed students be burdened with taking seven tests when they can take just one? We might save as much as $5 million. Because the ACT is given across the country, it will be easy to compare our students’ academic performances to those of students in other states. Having our schools center their efforts on preparing our students to take a college entrance exam will improve their performance on the exam and make it easier for them to get into college.

Why are these arguments wrong? There are fundamental differences between the purpose and design of subject mastery exams and those of college readiness assessments. The ACT is not designed to test whether a student has learned the content of a discipline. The science section, for example, is only 35 minutes long. The ACT administrators explicitly state that the test is not designed to assess a student’s substantive knowledge of any area of science – it tests reasoning skills, not content. This thin gruel may be enough to evaluate a college application, but it isn’t nearly good enough to serve as the capstone of an excellent science education. At least, though, there’s some science on the ACT – it doesn’t test history at all.

Compare the ACT to the exams of the nation’s education leader, Massachusetts. The ACT is a one-day, all multiple-choice question exam in three subject areas. Massachusetts allocates twice as much testing time, over five days, for math and English alone. Its exams aren’t all multiple choice. Students are required to answer challenging questions that require written analysis. They must also pass one two-day exam in biology, chemistry, physics, or engineering – in other words, an actual science.

Common sense tells you that exams designed to assess whether students have truly mastered the core content of the high school curriculum must be more extensive and challenging than a college admissions tool. A couple of million of savings in a $2.5 billion education budget is insignificant. Surely our education experts know this. So what’s really going on?

I think the education bureaucrats and business leaders are playing this ACT gambit to smuggle back in the Common Core standards the Legislature rejected last session. If we use the Common Core-based ACT as our end-of-instruction measure, teachers and schools will have no choice but to align their curriculum with the Common Core standards.

Put the question of political honesty aside. Is it really worth giving up on the idea of high-quality, content-rich exams in order to back-door education standards many Oklahomans resist?

Andrew C. Spiropoulos is a professor of law at the Oklahoma City University School of Law and the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

One comment

Thank you Andrew for writing this honest description of the ACT assessments. I totally agree that we must have good strong academic content standards. That is what most Oklahoman expect and support in K-12 gr. education.